I don’t say anything. Don’t rush her.
She goes quiet long enough that I think that’s all she’s giving me until she speaks again. Soft.
“I was there the day she died.”
The words drop flat between us.
“Yeah?”
Her fingers stop moving on the stem.
“Yes.”
Nothing in her face changes at first, but her voice does. Thinner now. Pulled tighter. “I was in the closet.”
Every muscle in me goes still.
She blinks up at the sky once. Twice.
“She put me there sometimes if she thought something was wrong. Told me it was a game. Told me not to come out unless she came to get me herself.” Her throat works. “That day a woman came.”
Her hand tightens around the dandelion hard enough that a few white strands drift loose into the air.
“The woman sounded so angry,” Ayla whispers. “I remember that first. I got small peeks of what she looked like, but—” Her brows pull together. “I don’t… I don’t really know what happened. Not all of it. I heard shouting. My mother trying to calm her down. Then more shouting. Then—”
She cuts herself off.
I can hear her breathing change. Rougher. The field suddenly feels too still. Too bright.
I shift closer.
“Ayla.”
She shuts her eyes.
“I remember the sound.” Her voice breaks a little around it and she hates that, I can tell. I can see it in the way her jaw clenches right after. “And then everything went quiet, and I stayed in the closet for so long until I was brave enough to leave it.”
She swallows hard. “I never got a reason why.”
I say nothing.
There’s nothing to say to that. Nothing that doesn’t sound weak beside a little girl sitting in the dark with her mother’s blood drying somewhere outside the door.
Her fingers keep twisting the dandelion stem until it bends.
“Then Baba died,” she says quietly, staring up at the sky. “And I thought maybe… maybe then Gabriel would let me go. Just once. To visit her. To talk to her.”
My throat constricts.
“But he said no.” Her mouth twists. “Said if I went, he’d have men watching and they’d drag my ass back home.”
My jaw locks.
She laughs, but there’s nothing warm in it. “I just want to know why. Why that woman did it. Why my mother had to die. Why I was never even allowed to go to her grave.”
The field goes silent around us.
Or maybe that’s just the sound of my temper turning mean.
